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June 2005

South Coast

David Aaronson
2005-10-01 20:46:31

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I highly recommend you keep them away from the trees because they cheat and withdraw from the playing field as soon as they get near one.

The airport is just south of Oranjestad (3) and the cruise port is right in the middle of it so pretty much every one arriving on the island has to start there. It's also the official home of all the traffic in Aruba. For an island of 95,000 people it's amazing how many cars there can be driving around Oranjestad. The waterfront is Caribbean standard featuring lots of duty-free shopping, faux-Mexican entertainment complexes and people who want to braid your hair. A block or so inland there are lots of excitingly pastel Dutch-looking buildings and some stores where locals actually shop. I suppose we should mention that Aruba is a Dutch protectorate and technically Dutch is the official language but you'll only hear it being spoken by Dutch students who came to Aruba to work for the summer.

The language of the people is Papiamento which is a fun mix of English, Spanish and Dutch with some French and Mandarin thrown in and a few words randomly invented from a Scrabble tile bag apparently. This incidentally is a fort. That building behind the cars is the grand edifice of colonial Oranjestad. So it won't be much of a surprise that it never successfully repelled an attack. Not that there have been a whole lot in Aruba. The clock tower is the Willem III Tower (4). This can be toured along with a couple small museums on Aruban history, geology and world currency (no, seriously). Otherwise, Oranjestad is mostly for shopping and dining and sitting at traffic lights.

Here is the Aruban parliament which is actually another place they probably speak Dutch (5). Melanie is standing in the shade because I made her walk all over Oranjestad and we were mostly dehydrated by this point. Standing in shade is a fairly major hobby in Aruba. We did it in most of the major ...

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